This invention relates to a system for the use of natural language to access and present data. More particularly, this invention discloses a system that allows a user to navigate through a menu to select parameters in order to generate and title a report.
In the prior art, the process of generating reports from a database has involved a very mechanical means of accessing data and setting a standardized title for standardized reports. A report is an aggregation of data from a database that presents specific information in response to a certain query. When reports are generated, they are generally given preset titles which have been hard-coded to be associated with a particular report. Users have been limited from employing natural language phrases to create a title for the report. There has been a need in the field of the present invention to make the accessing and presentation of data more user-friendly. The prior art lacks an effective means of using natural language phrasing to enable storytelling through the presentation of data.
Also, generally when application programs which provide front-end interfaces are used, a menu-based system at the top of the display area which takes up a certain amount of space is provided. These menus are provided to allow the user to make selections to activate certain operations, the result of which is shown in the remainder of the screen. As the amount of display area which is available is limited, this can be an inefficient use of space. There is a need for a menu-based system which can serve a dual function, thereby increasing the amount of available display area.
Furthermore, in the past, the process of creating a natural language system for a database involved writing a natural language grammar and a corresponding lexicon. This type of system interprets natural language expressions typed in by the user and parses these expressions into database queries. The creation of this type of system normally requires years of time-consuming work by a linguist and/or lexicographer.
Natural language systems generally fall into two categories: those based on pseudo-English, where a user must learn a command language that is English-like, such as COBOL, and those based on the theory that a user should be allowed to express himself as naturally as he does in everyday life and that the system should be able to make sense of his input. In the latter system, an input string comprises a question in natural language, and the system interprets this question and formulates a query. In order to accomplish this, interfaces to database systems have employed a type of grammar logic which is used to characterize the sets of acceptable input strings. A parsing system accesses this logic to parse the input string into functional parts that comply with the grammar logic. Neither of the two categories of natural language systems are in widespread use today as they are neither easy to use nor are they easy to construct and operate.
There are several problems which accompany pure natural language interfaces. When users inputted their statements with less than accurate grammatical structure, systems generally were not able to process these statements. Users needed to know the limitations and boundaries of the grammar logic which had been implemented in that particular system. Accordingly, there is a need for a more effective way for a user to formulate a natural language phrase recognizable by a computer system without any specialized knowledge.
Databases have become crucial to the operations of day-to-day business and processes, not only because of the increased volume of data, but because of the relationships between the data which can be exploited. For example, Structured Query Language (SQL) has become the preferred means of communicating queries to relational databases. There are presently various methods of querying a database; however, the concept of graphically depicting a query on a display screen is a relatively new approach to the database interfacing art. Visual queries, or graphical queries, make use of graphics on a graphical user interface (GUI) to represent the query, which in the past, was previously defined as an SQL statement. This type of query system presents a pictorial depiction of the search and eliminates the need for a user to learn any sort of query language, SQL in particular.
Another means of communicating queries to relational databases is the multidimensional (MDX) statement. In the MDX model, a MDX query can be reduced to a number of unique SQL statements, however, it has the additional feature of iterative refinement. In the MDX model, a query can be modified by taking the data from the original query and modifying it, eliminating the need to regenerate the entire modified query and retrieve the entire data set a second time. Two common MDX models in the prior art are those supported by Microsoft""s OLD DB for an Online Analytical Processing interface and those supported by the MDAPI interface from the OLAP Council.
A reduction in the amount of time invested in the training of a system user is an area where further efficiency can be achieved. Fortunately, there are already tools, such as an already established base of queries formulated by classical SQL expressions, to help attain this efficiency. However, the end users of databases are often not very proficient in the tools available to efficiently and accurately access database systems. Thus, a need exists for systems which convert query statements into visual representations understandable by novice database users.
The present invention provides a system for creating and titling reports from a database by using a graphical title bar navigator to create and depict a natural language phrase from a menu to query a database and title the resulting report such that the navigator itself becomes the title. A database contains certain sets of data with certain relationships between these sets. These sets of data are manually mapped to the navigator such that it duplicates the hierarchical structure present in the database.
The present invention focuses on generating a query interface to a database through this navigator wherein each choice of data available for retrieval is an option in the menu. Instead of allowing a user to type in a natural language sentence, it constrains the user""s input options through this navigator. Each subsequent selection in the menu is a narrower subset of the prior selection, resulting in the creation of a drill down query. The user specifies only the tables, fields, and operations that are required. Because the options for creating the query are limited by the categories of data that are available in the menu, it is possible to constrain the menu such that complete, grammatically correct sentences are created.
The user chooses a first parameter from the menu through the navigator by selecting the graphical icon representing that parameter from the menu. This icon is animated to a larger size and highlighted. Based on this selection, a further set of parameters is made available. Another selection is made by choosing the appropriate graphical icons and so on, until the specificity of the query has been achieved. Further graphical icons representing grammatical connectors are placed between these selections to provide the flow of a natural language phrase. Therefore, each selection that is made grammatically follows the selection before it, such that, upon completion, the navigator depicts a complete sentence in natural language form. The system constrains the choices in order to ensure the creation of a grammatically correct natural language phrase. The query corresponds to an SQL statement, which is communicated from the interface to the database management system which, in turn, accesses the relevant data and returns it to the interface. The same natural language phrase which was used to query the database persists on the display and serves as the title of the report.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a visual means of formulating natural language queries to a database system.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a navigation system to navigate through a menu of parameters.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide animation and highlighting functionality to the navigation system to facilitate user interaction.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a navigation system which depicts a natural language phrase corresponding to a query for and the title of, a report from a database.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a pictorial representation of a query formulated by a user to a database system.
It is a further object of the present invention to translate a database table structure into a graphical menu in a navigation system which interfaces to a database system.